When Spain’s civil war broke out in 1936, there were about 600 military pilots in the country, split between the Air Force and the Naval Air Service. Of these, around 250 remained loyal to the government, 150 joined the coup, and the rest were imprisoned, executed or otherwise disappeared. Initially of course the shock of the coup caused the government air forces many problems, but they also suffered from a lack of experience and a pool of often outdated aircraft. However, in time they would receive new aircraft and volunteers from many parts of the world, including France and, most importantly, the Soviet Union, where some Spanish pilots were also trained. In the early part of the war they were able to achieve near air superiority on most fronts, but over time the support of the Soviet Union waned, while the Nationalists received considerable aid from Italy and Germany, and as the war progressed, the Republicans gradually lost the battle for the skies.

To begin our look at this set we need to make some introductions. The first four figures in our top row depict pilots wearing flight suits, and clearly ready to fly, while the fifth man wears overalls and a peaked cap, and the sixth wears his normal uniform of jacket and trousers with peaked cap, shirt and tie. The first three in the second row all look to be ground crew, dressed in their working clothes, and naturally the remaining seated figures are all pilots actually in their machines. The poses are for the most part quite generic, without any specific activity being depicted. The pilots in the top row could easily be deployed around their planes, as some look to be climbing onto them, but the ones out of flight gear are more general, as might be seen on any airfield. Pilot poses tend not to have much action to them for obvious reasons, but these are all fine. The first ground crew, a slender woman, is just standing and holding something (a rag?), while the second is pulling ammunition from a box, and the third is kneeling and could be doing almost anything. Of the many plausible ground crew poses that could have been chosen, these three are about as good as any, so again are perfectly usable. The seated pilots are the only ones potentially actually in action, but of course the pose is very fixed once they are in the cockpit, and while they all have their hands in their laps, and seem very relaxed, given the limited visibility of cockpits once the pilot is installed, these will work well enough too.

Naturally the Republican pilots initially wore the uniform and equipment of the Fuerzas Aéreas de la República Española, and this changed only in minor details such as insignia throughout the war, although in 1938 new summer walking out and service uniforms were introduced. For pilots such as we have in this set, the normal Spanish flight suit continued to be worn, although French and particularly Soviet versions augmented this later on. However at this scale such minor differences are far from apparent, and we thought all of them looked good. The third figure in the row also wears a jacket over his flight suit, and of course all wear the flying helmet and goggles. The first three are already wearing their seat parachute, and the fourth has a parachute rigged to his front; to our inexpert eye all the straps and details of these harnesses looked correct. The overalls of the fifth pilot, and the uniform of the sixth, all look authentic too, so no accuracy problems with these pilots. The ground crew all wear overalls (called ‘mono’) of one sort or another, and two also wear the distinctive Spanish Gorillo side caps, while the man with the ammunition seems to wear a beret, a particularly popular item in Republican circles. Their overalls are varied, but then so too was the reality, especially as aid and volunteers came from many nations, so these all look accurate. Finally, the three seated pilots have the same flight suits and helmets as the rest, at least as far as can be seen, although none have any sign of oxygen masks. Two of these have no visible parachute, but strangely the third has a seat parachute, but behind his lower back rather than as a seat. Our knowledge of such things does not extend to knowing if this was a reasonable arrangement or not, although it does make him less likely to fit inside the tight confines of a model aircraft.

The sculpting here is nice, the proportions are great and the detail fair and mostly reasonably clear, although the clothing of the two officers not in flight gear seems very smooth and less convincing. Several of the faces are marred by what we can only describe as dribble – thin strands of plastic that don’t seem to serve any purpose, and look like they have fallen over the face before the mould was made. The level of flash is, infuriatingly, very varied, as some seams are completely clean while others have a significant amount of flash or very noticeable tabs. The majority are clean, which is good, but some cleaning up will still be required, and removing the excess plastic from some of the faces will be a very fiddly job. Also, the bases are very small and thin, particularly for the female mechanic, though all the figures do stand. This includes the two mechanics with no base at all, yet such slight bases do make these figures easy to knock over.

Many have seen the Spanish Civil War as a prelude to the World War that was to follow, and certainly in terms of air combat, many ideas would be tested and much experience gained which would be used soon enough in the rest of Europe and beyond. The pilots of the Republic did their best with the limited resources available to them, and whilst ultimately their efforts were in vain, they were an important element in the struggle that convulsed Spain in the later 1930s. With so few sets dedicated to this conflict as at the time of writing, it is nice to see this good one depicting such men and women as they found themselves engaged in what was perhaps the first major air war in history.